Dream Girl

Annette.

Psychologists posit something called the “cognitive schema.”  It’s a mental framework, a scaffolding, that we use for organizing our experiences and observations.  The framework, of course, forms in infancy, and new input is added to it throughout our lives.  If it doesn’t fit into the schema, we tend to discard it.

Annette.

We construct cognitive schema about people, events, roles, and even ourselves—they enable us to evaluate what’s happened and to predict what comes next.  They help us apply our values and to judge others’, and they make sense of the vast, chaotic mess of daily life.

Annette.

Behavioral scripts are learned through organizational socialization and on the job experience  According to Charles T. Schmidt of the University of Rhode Island, one of the ways we build this schema is to learns from “stories, myths, films, movies, conversations, role models.”  They even play a part in romance:  we tend to fall in love with the people who most closely match our cognitive schema for the “perfect” mate.

I built a huge chunk of mine from television.  And, as my schema of the ideal woman began to take shape, she looked and acted increasingly like one TV personality.

Annette. Annette Funicello.

I was seven.  She was twelve when the Mickey Mouse Club debuted in 1955.  Of course, millions of male baby boomers were around the same age, too, and subsequent experience tells me that many, if not most, of use developed a huge first crush on Annette.  She was the tallest of the Mouseketers  and arguably the most talented—a singer, a dancer, an outgoing extrovert.  Dark black hair, round face, ebullient personality and full of charm, she was the embodiment of the nascent bobby soxer of the ‘50s, and she even wore a rather tight turtleneck sweater as she grew and, um, developed.

And then, in the ‘60s, as I hit puberty, she hit the beach.  At first, Walt Disney insisted that she wear a demure, one-piece bathing suit for her “Beach Party” movies with Frankie Avalon, but she eventually donned a two-piece—still demure and modest, but a harbinger of the rebellions of the 1960s.  She exuded joy, good cheer, and the kind of innocent purity that the 1950s demanded of female role models.  And she held onto the complete image even after so many of use rejected it.

Then came the stunning part:  this avatar of energy and good, clean health had Multiple Sclerosis, the same disease my own mother had battled for over two decades and which finally killed her.  She faced it with dignity and courage, speaking publicly about her affliction, establishing a foundation to research neurological diseases, and providing a very different role model to both women and men.

Annette.  Like Ricky Nelson and Beaver Cleaver, she grew up on screens—and gave us a powerful framework to guide our own adolescence.

A ten-minute documentary about her life can be seen here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_hCCcCbY34